Alicia Glen Wants Women to Be Organized, Active—and Unapologetic About Their Hair Appointments

Since 2013, Alicia Glen has been installed at City Hall in New York, where she serves as the city's deputy mayor for housing and economic development. In her role, Glen oversees more than 40 city agencies. In the same afternoon, she may review plans to create hundreds of thousands of units of affordable housing and monitor the progress of a 250,000-square-foot space in Union Square that the city pledged to build in order to support its growing tech community.

But in between all that, she spends a lot of time thinking about the women in her office, the women she mentored when she headed up the urban investment division at Goldman Sachs, and the women she helped win back their homes or keep custody of their children.

"I grew up with the really unusual and lucky experience of having both a mother and a stepmother, two serious, kick-ass broads," Glen says. "And they had an amazing network of friends, these Upper West Side powerhouses. It wasn't until I got to maybe high school that I realized women didn't run the world."

She's been fighting to restore women to their rightful place ever since. Below, Glen outlines how you can help.

Organize. And don't worry if that makes people afraid.

No matter where you are on the pyramid, women need to consciously take time out of their days, weeks, weekends, whatever, to form a network of women peers. You need to organize, though "organize" sounds like a very strong word. But you do need to strategize a little. You have to think about what's most important and what you want to advocate for and then you have to get smart and get a game plan. Listen, you have to find out who your allies are and who you can pick off. It's like any deal. Like, before I walked into an investment committee, trust me, I had worked the committee members well before so that I could get my deal approved. And now it's the same idea here in government. If we want to get a pay equity bill passed, we've got to figure out who the women are in the legislative branch who could actually support it. And before the vote happens, you've got to spend time with them, you've got to develop those personal relationships. A lot of these issues are hard and a lot of times men aren't going to like them. Women—in workplaces, in government, everywhere—have got to stick together.

Before I walked into an investment committee, trust me, I had worked the committee members well before so that I could get my deal approved.

And when you have the power, know how to use it.

If you're a woman and you're finally in a position to hire, you need to communicate that you're looking to hire women. I said from the beginning at Goldman, "I want to build a team of people, and I'm probably going to lean more heavily towards having more women than men." I consciously cultivated some women internally, and I'd go through piles and piles of resumes when we were looking to hire externally. I just said, "I want to hire a lot of really smart women." And then I did that.

Alicia Glen (R) with Mayor Bill de Blasio (C)

Courtesy Alicia Glen

But the job doesn't end there. I was very deliberate about promotions. I didn't want to put one woman up for promotion. I was like, What if I have three women I want to put up? Why does it have to be just one? Where's that written in the Book of Life? One year I pushed two women to get promotions in a relatively small group because I refused to back down. And I wanted everyone to know that—that they had a boss who would throw their body in front of a train because this was that important to her and because now each of those women, who's seen that it's possible, is hopefully doing it for the next set of women. They knew I was prepared to piss people off. And you have to be prepared to piss people off sometimes in order to move the needle. A lot of people don't admit that, but it is what it is. It's hand-to-hand combat. And I hope I instilled that in those women I hired because they're going to have to put themselves out there sometimes, they're going to have to go toe-to-toe, and I want them to win.

Don't count out young people.

The day after the election, I wanted to crawl back into bed with a bottle of gin and give up. I think of a lot of women in my generation felt that way. We were paralyzed. But within the first six or seven hours of everybody waking up, the younger women were already organizing. My daughters were planning to stay home from school that day and take to the streets! And I was basically sobbing under my duvet, saying, "Do I have to go to work today? I can't handle this!"

The day after the election, I wanted to crawl back into bed with a bottle of gin and give up.

I saw how quickly they sprang into action and it was incredibly inspiring to me and it makes me think something really amazing is going to come out of this—a new wave of women activists. And it's not like it was for me. We have amazing technology now and so much innovation, and women are at the forefront of that. And they're smart and funny and cheeky and entrepreneurial. They want to do this themselves. They want to run their own companies and start their own organizations. To me, that's the beginning of something huge, because then we won't be having these conversations about how many women there are at Goldman Sachs. They'll be running these companies to begin with. Anything that women my age can do to help young women take control of their own lives, they should. I now see that as our primary mission.

Advocate for small change, too.

We all want equal pay. We're all fighting for equal pay, and since it's technically the law, we really should have it. But in New York City, we look at incremental laws that will make a difference. We have issued, for example, an executive order that affects how we hire in city government. We have 300,000 people working in New York City government. So we're the biggest company in New York City, by far. During the interview process, I know that the interviewer will always say, "Tell me about your salary history." It traps prospective employees. It's like, either you lie and inflate it and you're terrified you're going to get caught or you tell the truth and you get a vastly undercut offer. And it's a real phenomenon that especially impacts women because if someone got paid less in her previous job, she's going to continue to make less than a man would in her next job. The fact is, either you deserve to make $100,000 doing X or you don't. Why does it matter what you used to make? You have to work towards the big goals every day, but you also have to fight for these smaller victories because they make a real difference in women's everyday lives.

And news flash: A hair appointment isn't a secret.

When I started at Goldman, the men in the firm would leave on a Thursday or early on a Friday and spend the weekend at Pebble Beach. Everyone did it. They'd have some meeting there and they'd go golfing. It was considered a totally normal course of business. It wasn't anything special. Of course they would go golfing because they'd be doing "business" on the golf course. It was never a question, never a matter of discussion. They put it on their schedules, which everyone in the group could see. They were in Pebble Beach.

[M]y assistant used to say, "Should I write 'private appointment'?" And I'd be like, "No, write that I'm going to get my roots done!"

Meanwhile, every few weeks, I'd need to get my roots done. I said to my assistant, "Put it on my schedule; I'm getting my roots done." At the beginning, my assistant used to say, "Should I write 'private appointment'?" And I'd be like, "No, write that I'm going to get my roots done!"

I really believe that I need to have my roots done so that I can do my job, so that I can sit in meetings and look professional. To me, going to a hair appointment is no different than what these guys were doing going to Pebble Beach. So it went on my schedule. And people were shocked.

Well, news flash: That's my real life. And I really hope the women who were in my group saw that I wasn't just pretending I was at a client meeting, that I was acknowledging the fact that it takes two hours to get my roots done. It never meant that I wasn't making as much money for the firm or that I wasn't doing as many deals. And if men wanted to make fun of me for getting my roots done, well that's just tough on them. Now that I work in government and the entire public can access my schedule, they want me to put it down as a "private appointment." I'm like, Really?

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